The mediation of shallow ethics and moral confusion

Mediation is a term I have been thinking about of late. It functions well as another window onto the question of how we engage reality and the nature of our relationship with the world beyond our subjective interior. To what degree is our life world mediated? By whom? Or what? And to what degree? The term provides an enrichment to ideology: Where ideology reveals itself through language at its most evident, mediation points to the the whole range of human experiences and wider material and social world we inhabit positing it all as relational at root. Additionally, it provides an alternative to lenses for it goes beyond mere perception and viewing, and hermenuetics as perspectival practice. Mediation asks what is it that negotiates the relationship between everything that makes up a complex human being, and every aspect of the world that he or she comes into relationship with from birth to death.

Mediation can become a very big teacher indeed.

I first realized the utility of the term from Guy Debord, who considered it primary in his critique of the Society of the Spectacle and emergent Consumer Capitalism. Reading his book sent me off exploring the terrain of agency, where I found Raymond Williams and John Fiske, two fascinating Brits, and part of the same intellectual tradition as Debord, who argue that mediation is not a one way street: We negotiate, not always, but in part, with the dominant social forces at play. We are not mere passive objects acted upon by external forces as some of the more paranoid voices on ideology would have us believe, such as Louis Althusser. Where the line stands between agency and freewill, on the one hand, and mediating and ideological forces, on the other, is what drives my continued curiosity in these topics. And it is that curiosity as it meets our mad-hat present that drives the route this article takes.

Meditating and Mediating

Occasionally, I meditate for a while, and then I see the world more clearly. I use meditation sessions as a deliberate attempt to relax the pull of mediation through whatever is dominating my thoughts and feelings, perception and assumptions, and see if I can shake of its binds and preferences, if only for a while, to be replaced by something else, potentially illuminating, potentially damning. Who or what mediates the emotions that come up on that cushion? Why do I feel this way in response to a headline, a Tweet, a news broadcast, sat still on that chair? Those emotions are not mine. They are a product of the mediating forces of society. This daft idea we are all experiencing our own emotions is solipsism’s grasp after all. So, again. Who shoved that outrage in my stomach? Who pushed that silly thought into my head? Who convinced me to waste time following a line of thought labeled ‘outrage’? And, who says I must join one of these damn ridiculous identity groups battling over images and symbols?

“I’m not ‘avin it!” But of course, to some degree, I am, and, we are.

Session over, body rises, and off I go.

The world demands I mediate my relationship with the dominant social forces that are active in this world -not all of them, of course, but enough, perhaps too many. I can only do this to the degree that I am conscious of their interplay with what appear as my emotions, my thoughts, my feelings and desires. The unseen interactions, I take for granted, and experience them as natural and given; they continue. It will take an external observer to point out their presence.There is agency operating, as there is choice for what to do with attention in practice but it is never total, never final. The world has a say in ways I know I cannot see, and will never fully appreciate. I do my best, knowing it will never be enough, for my relationship with practice, with meditation, with the basic elements of this body and the spaces I inhabit is deeply affected by the processes of mediation and the choices I make or fail to make. When I practice, there is always negotiation, and discrimination.

All of this richness and exchange is so obvious when we look at the breadth of our lives with enough attention, yet we all know there are those who make a buck, or bolster their beliefs by claiming otherwise: that total entrapment is all we have, or total freedom is on the end of enough hours of meditating. Which is to say, we are either fully entrapped in a world of their favorite dark social forces, or that we have only to practice enough and we will achieve total freedom in this very lifetime. What stories we tell ourselves.

Returning to practice briefly

I have long given up on the silly idea that meditation will allow me to see reality as it in some complete, global manner, or guide me to discover the secret essence somewhere inside of me and get to the end of the story. There is something almost comforting in knowing that our experiences in this world happen in complex, intersecting relationships of exchange, whether human and social, or at the level of material biology, or even the sensory experience of viewer and the viewed. I accept that perception is always positional, relational and in movement: no view from nowhere, no god’s eye view, no hubris of the enlightened, or total transcendence of the human condition.

Those who take moments of seeming illumination as such, or their awakened minds as possessing this ability, are, in my humble view, caught in a way-station of partial delusion; hanging out in a state of glory. This, while the world remains far beyond their grasp and far bigger than even awakened awareness can capture. To believe otherwise is a delicious temptation and I am sure many self-declared awakened souls will contest what I have stated and justify their handy grasp on the way things are. That’s fine. They are welcome to. May they continue to live lives with far less psycho-emotional suffering than most. May they find use of their remaining years and not trap too many in the game of trying to reproduce what they have achieved through stories of the big one; “I got enlightenment right here, buddy!” Perhaps. Maybe.

The kind of practice I am speaking to, beyond the claims of final escape, is thus a shift in perspective, a re-calibration of the strings of interdependence within a world of meaning making, narration and perceptual privileging, where even practice acts as mediator. This is far richer than mere pristine awareness, or the indulgence of love is everything. Again, in case you missed it, such things are beautiful and fine and worth a pretty penny in the practicing life, but do not get stuck there. The world beckons you on and out. Listen, look and heed its call. Learn to think, more clearly, and inform yourself of the immensity of this home of ours while your heart keeps beating and your mental faculties are operative. Perhaps its worth your time. Just maybe, you will discover there is more to do.

World gone loco (that’s matto or pazzo for the Italians out there)

The world is far darker than we wish to admit. It is not only dark, of course, we get this right? But its darkness is ever-present in a way our species has always struggled to relate to and which “enlightened” folk too often bypass in their hurry to see the great light dominate the phenomenology of their lives. If God and heaven and buddha nature were the preferred pronouns, sorry, coping mechanisms of preference for a couple of thousand years for dealing with earthly and human darkness, hyper-reflexivity and deliberate-distraction have steadily become their replacements and the expectation of never-ending progress the swap in for the after-life.

We are currently reeling in the shock of the death of the latter fantasy, another offspring of the Christian God, yet most do not realize that is what is actually going on. Sooner or later, they will. For now, we blunder through the sleepy-headed notions of our most recent ancestors.

Stop being a nice assehole

A world rooted in a never-ending array of distractions and self-absorption is by its nature a shallow and superficial affair and one blind to the dominant mediating forces in play. Dare I say, such a world is an unserious one, dominated by unserious people, who at best, can only perform the mannerisms of seriousness, but not really grasp what is beyond representational performance. From this, it is no wonder our cultural products are increasingly the stuff of shallow thought, feelings and ethics. Mediated by hyper-Capitalism’s new dark horses of social media, partisan journalism, and hyper-stimulating online environments, all of this is not just the inevitable outcome of this phase of Attention Capitalism, it is the further dumbing down of dumbed down culture in a fast-food feast of infinite choice, where nothing seems to have much value anymore.

Increasingly, cultural products are excusing people not only from investing patient attention in understanding the complex world around them, but in giving up on the reality that lies beyond them. There are too many who simply prefer to live in a representation and dismiss reality as an annoying distraction, or as enemy when it undermines their internal beliefs and performative identities.

Then there is the culture war; more real than realty itself! The best kind of war, closer to fiction and rooted in partisan hot-takes, forever adaptable to rewrites and recastings. Its tag-line being; “Who cares as long as it feels right!” It is in many ways akin to Po-Mo performance art: baffling, self-centred and largely ugly. It is  steeped in the desire for the appearance of victorious politics (the real stuff is far too dull), and further levels of therapeutically minded self-reinvention. This criticism is obviously aimed at the troops on the Left: The right’s faults being self-evident for decades and far less imaginative. The New Left is where today’s baffling dysfunction is on full display, partly because appearance and image management is so central to its core concerns. Its self-denial regarding its excesses, make-believe regarding its obsessions, and cos-play being the most visible expression of this absurdist take on human folly. The Left is the side most willing to adapt itself to the new economics of representational capture. It is of course the capture that blocks people from realizing their active role in mediation, where choice still lies. One that can only be reprized by distance from the cheap payoffs of identity politics, critique of its underlying assumptions, and a perspective from outside of the warm glow of the tribal hearth and its emotional reward.  

Niceness

One aspect of all this I find particularly interesting is not the petty bourgeoisie side-taking that only class privilege can provide, but the dominant, underlying moral value of most of it that has captured large portions of the Left and polite society since the 1950s. I am talking about niceness: A generic, shallow value that requires little in the way of real reflection and is designed to keep everything on the surface. This is what makes it such a good fit for a society increasingly mediated by shallow cultural products. It is essentially an ethics of pacification and shared consent to remain within the bounds of the mediated world and safely away from the discomforts and disruption of the Real and the demands of the Great Feast to interrogate one’s own views and mature intellectually.

Flavors of niceness exist on both sides of the political spectrum, of course, though today seem to dominate Liberal-Progressive identities most. As Conservatives/Republicans once used polite society and the ethics of niceness to ignore dark shit in their name, so does the Left today. “But we’re different!” they shout.

I bet they wish this were true. When reality is a story, rewrite.

Yet, a kinder reading, why not?

We might see niceness, indirectly, as a response to the excesses of reflexivity: A coping mechanism for the sadness, anger, frustration, petty desires and other unspoken and unwanted aspects of the Id that poke through the surface of the norms of reflexivity and the social expectations that accompany it. Their denial of such darkness can be heard in phrases, such as; ‘I would never do that’, ‘How could anyone be so mean?’ ‘If everyone were a little bit nicer, I’m sure we’d all get along’. ‘Just be nice, and that messy, dark stuff can be ignored’. What a nightmare to live in; a world surrounded by the looming threat of harsh reality breaking through and thus one with an undercurrent of terror. How suffocating and/or dull. No fire. No earth. No blood to speak of. Tea and biscuits, Frapuccinos and Sunday lunch and the same conversations played again and again. Today transformed into Instagram heaven, with never ending likes for showing off your artificial beauty, daft stunts, and activist moral posturing. Rainbow flag anyone? Illusion’s grasp indeed.

I do wonder what George Carlin or even Chogyam Trungpa would have made of it all.

It is not just the boomers of course. Being nice also allows for its alliance with the irony of the post-modern subject, itself a sort of incarnated avoidance strategy and method-acting for keeping everything surface level; a popular interpretation of pop-post-modern sympathies after all is that nothing truly matters anyway, so why bother? And if you do, at least be nice about it, or pretend to be a rebel, but do not over-do it. If it happens to be too much, just be ironic about that too. And even in this, there is something rather nice to be found. Irony, after all, is better than a punch in the face. Generation X may have had its moments of disruption in Punk and cynicism and irony, but of course, it got folded into its own status quo and niceness was too much to resist once the kids were born, the mortgage needed paying and the grandparents were suddenly useful as free child care. “Ok, ok, we’ll be nice too if you’ll watch the kids.”

I can’t help but think that the ethic of niceness is rooted in a simple yet insidious idea that the new morals of the left should be devoid of all religious influence and grand moral statements; the sort that have consequences, the sort that call for that old-fashioned annoyance of responsibility.

The safest, most harmless option to a muddled and potentially dangerous world, is simply to be nice. After all, in the vision of man that underpins left-wing ideologies, deep down, we are all naturally and incurably good before nasty old society comes in and makes us betray our true natures and infinite potential for self-realization. Remember, if we could keep kids pure, they say, the world would be free of all the messy horrors that have blighted it for so long. We just need to hold to the idea of niceness; conjure it up through self-affirming cultural products, therapeutic interventions, and the abolishment of power relations to ensure nasty reality does not happen to the kids of tomorrow, who will hopefully be nice enough to save us from ourselves

Wouldn’t that be great?

Poor buggers.

What a burden.

The ethics of niceness holds the mediated world of the progressive left together

They instinctively and rightly know that if it is abandoned, the whole thing will fall apart. This is why the new left can be so nice, yet so cruel; so nice and yet so delusional. Excruciatingly nice to specific categories of unknown/imaginary others, yet rage at, trash, and cancel those unwelcome folks closer to home, who are also unknown/imaginary others; a sort that is somehow unnatural, obscene. Clearly Id material, and therefore representative of the dark past we managed to escape and forget about through retellings of history and ironic disdain. Such folk do not possess the necessary condition for being considered fellow citizens anyway, and can thus be demoted to a sub-human class (western dalits), and, if possible, cured of their inability to be nice through some form of training and indoctrination into better selves, which will be just like ours (of course). If you manipulate social conditions with the just the right amount of imaginary magic, the world will surely become your desired utopia. It’s always worked in the past, right?

Discrimation gets a bad rap

The Left, especially the middle-class Left-wing, is driven by a pathological need to maintain niceness even as allegiance to it forces an ever increasing detachment from reality and logic. This insight, gained on the meditation cushion, helped me to understand why so many progressives get so nervous when you explicitly judge people and groups in a generic manner, even when it is true, even when all the evidence points to it being so, and even when those groups are so explicitly against central progressive tenets. Hold the fort, you can hear them crying inside. “Ignore, ignore, protect, protect. It’s all too much!” The Id emerges again and retreat occurs. We all know it is best to only let that out on social media, right, good people? The one space where niceness can be abandoned, though only by degrees, and only fully if you hide behind a fake name and the rainbow flag and a poorly interrogated political slogan.

Discrimination has lost its meaning of choosing between options based on careful criteria and consideration and is now a symbol of hate. Discrimination for these folks is no longer rooted in rational evaluation but rather in Id-adjacent emotional reactivity justified through slogans that signal their worth to others caught in the same web of moral niceness. Just consider what it means to abandon the ability to discriminate intellectually. What else can you do but reproduce the slogans and messages mediated to you via social media and the most self-celebratory of activists on social media, or in the media bubble you inhabit. They do the thinking for you (sort of). The more mediated the world is by the spectacle, the less we find ourselves capable of distinguishing representations of things from reality, so it’s natural to take others’ word for it and to do so based on feelings. If the culture wars were one thing, which it isn’t of course, it would be that, representations constantly mistaken for reality, and preferred over it every time, because it they feel right; they just do.

Choice and nuance are lost + identity crises

If it is not nice, it is felt deep down that it must be really, really wrong, so wrong as to not require explanation, analysis or extended consideration. This is the default position, and they cannot quite explain why. Their hyper-reflexivity has been wed to the project of self-denial of their own darkness and the cultural darkness that blights so many parts of the Earth, so what can they do but produce a highly distorted, highly mediated vision of the world that is ironically deeply moral, but superficially so – a stance that is a composite of avoidance strategies and self-protection.

Challenging their shared agreement to hold niceness as the highest moral standard can never be allowed, firstly because they do not even realize it is the underlying given that props of the world as tolerable. Then to even do so would be to signal your allegiance to the wrong tribe and permit them to ignore you as well as the accusation, and any reality claims made in support of divergence and discrimination. “Not nice? Not important! Not nice? Ignore!” The long-held passive-aggressive character of the middle-class has mutated into cancellations, blocking the undesirables on Twitter, and mutual moral celebration across highly mediated and controlled social media spaces. It has been fed by acquiescence to the unthinking activists teetering on extremism, who can never be criticized, for they were made by these same folk. To critique them would empower the evil other over there in our midst, so best pretend it is all fine and hold tight deep down to the delusion that their intentions must ultimately be good.

Their inability to square the shallowness of niceness with the real world is why they partition it into mediated forms of the good according to partisan criteria in denial of the complexity of a world far greater than their ideological roots can speak to. The consequence is that their need to live within the fort of niceness must be maintained through delusion’s game. Self-critique, unless itself a project of becoming nicer, cannot be tolerated. Worse, it is a sign you are moving over to the other tribe, thus genuine self-critique, even a hint of it, is met with ostracization and the looming threat of reputation destruction, in service to niceness, of course. In extreme cases, the allowance of cruelty for kindness is permitted – needs must after all! Who cares if a few top themselves after having their lives destroyed by online activist: they were not nice people, after all…”Best we do not think that out loud, but it feels right.”

Their identities, fostered in increasingly therapeutic, individualistic culture from the 1950s onwards, is rooted in a story of the conquering of the dark side of humanity, of the expulsion of the Id, of the denial of our animal selves & its primal needs. They are not interested in real histories, for those are merely stories that serve ideological commitments in the present. So they say. Their histories are better, apparently, righting wrongs, yet in denial of diverse views and uncomfortable facts, which get in the way of their new myth of universal niceness built on highly partisan and delusional readings of the world. The self-reflexivity of the masses means that all of this, is, deep down, fundamentally all about themselves too…”Oh no,” they say, “That can’t be true.” They can’t help but repeat. “Let me see. How many likes did my photo of myself draped in the Palestinian flag get? Oh, sorry, what were you saying?”

Is the madness of our age starting to make more sense?

Liberal Progressivism, as the philosopher John Gray has prophesied, cannot survive much longer. It is going the way of all other ideologies. These mad-hat signs that baffle so many and fuel the inanities of the divvy right-wing are a distraction, a spectacle, a riot of mass delusion. It will soon be R.I.P.

Now, I would have loved to have seen the internal structure of hyper-reflexivity in progressives transform into a genuine ability for self-critique & learning, because despite where we have ended up, they did for a long time represent the intellectual means for finding a way forwards, understanding our present, and expanding our appreciation for history and its role in our present. Alas new tribalism (identity politics) arose to cement the new wave of the hyper-progressives into a bubble of collective illusion, delusion and recycled myth making, whilst the sore losers of the 1960s cheer on with spite at its oikophobia & fetish for nihilistic self-destruction. That’s not nice, of course. But they don’t see it that way. So it isn’t that way. And so the story goes.

Tribalism mediates not just the world of men, but reality, through thick lenses of stubborn stupidity. It is unfit, in all its forms, to face the world in its immense complexity and the real 21st century challenges we all face. It is, in practice, a set of flavors of retreat. Niceness, for many, is the face of confirmation that they are living in the same social reality their desired tribe has been partitioned off into. Like spiritual folk who paint the world in their delusion, and to often end up gullible and susceptible to cults, these folks do the same, confusing their mediated world for reality, denying that representations are just that, and grasping at them even harder whenever reality’s light shines in on them.

What can we do, especially if we wish to avoid pessimism about all this?

How about we embrace a full-bloodied approach to mediation as a landscape of practice? Abandon niceness too and the social practices that enforce it, but not acts of genuine kindness and human decency. Explore ethical and moral takes on the world at the Great Feast beyond right and left wing politics to gain greater historical perspective on the role of ethics and morality, yes, even that triggering word. Start to develop qualities that transcend the stupidity of tribal politics and any forms of polarization promoted by reactionary fools. Develop a fuller understanding of our animal selves and therefore greater appreciation for human and animal darkness to temper the naive view that underpins niceness. Educate yourselves to think beyond the mediated world you have been inculcated into by your identity groups by using more intelligent forms of social and individual practice to mediate your relationship with the ever-present world of hyper-reality via intelligent, carefully considered ideas. 

That seems doable, right? It might even be a nice idea to do so.